OF COURSE Dropbox Is Going To Kill A Program That Turns It Into Bittorrent

Dropbox is the super convenient (and super successful) cloud backup service. A handful of open source advocates are upset that Dropbox is trying to squash an open source program called Dropship which basically turns your Dropbox account into a filesharing hub.Dropbox has file sharing features for groups that work on shared documents, and Dropship uses that feature to turn your Dropbox account into an equivalent of a Bittorrent node.

Look, it’s Dropbox’s service, and it’s a business. Dropbox makes money from premium subscriptions but it still costs money to run a huge cloud-based backup service, and it’s their prerogative to limit uses of their service.

While it’s correct that there are legitimate uses for this kind of file sharing, no one should kid themselves that if Dropship becomes widely used 99% of usage is going to be anything other than sharing pirated content. For Dropbox, that means extra costs, a legal liability, and just a giant headache.

It’s a service for people to back up and sync their files seamlessly. It’s totally legitimate for them not to want to become the next Bittorrent. So stop whining.

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